Death of the Death of Longform Journalism

The Death of the Death of Longform Journalism
The web was supposed to kill longform journalism. And it almost did. Turns out, the problem wasn’t that the stories were too long. People love stories! The problem was the delivery method — we finally had the tools to read pieces when, how, and where we wanted...

Wasn’t the Internet supposed to obliterate our attention spans, turning all reporting into easily digestible tidbits? Not according to longform.org Co-Founder Max Linsky, whose SXSW presentation will discuss the optimal delivery method for longform stories and how publishers are harnessing innovative technologies to breathe new life into longform journalism.

For years, conventional wisdom held that for text to work online, it had to be short and digestible. Nobody had the time to read 5,000 words on a web browser, and fewer still were willing to pay for the privilege. But at the same moment that many publishers scaled back their longform work, or abandoned it altogether, a new audience of readers emerged thanks to innovative apps like Instapaper, Read It Later, and Readaility.

Longform.org posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser. We recommend enjoying them using read later services like Instapaper and Read It Later and feature buttons to save articles with one click.

"I think in today's world, what we've seen is that people are hungry for bits of information," Engelberg said. "Mediocre long-form journalism falls by the wayside in this kind of world, but superb long-form journalism, I think, has a secure place in the future of writing."

Amazon has launched Kindle Singles, one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article. The Singles can be read on any of the many Kindle platforms, from the Kindle itself through smart-phones to Amazon’s desktop Kindle client, and they are priced accordingly, from $1 to $5.